Cold outside, warm inside.

Apparently, dd2 thinks it's summer inside. All this lovely money we're spending on natural gas to heat our home has made her think that it's warm enough to run around most of the day with just a diaper on. As a result, she has a cough that is taking her forever to get over.

Tonight she came to me--mostly naked, of course--with a shovel and pail and said she wanted to go to the park right then so she could play in the sand. Over and over I said, "No, it's dark and cold outside." She just didn't get it. Elsa may sing that the cold doesn't bother her anyway, but here in real life, little princesses need to stay warm and get healthy!

Boxing Day Plumbing

I spent all afternoon and into the evening installing a new bathroom faucet. It took a long time because I also had to install shutoff valves on the pipes coming from the wall and use a hacksaw to get the old faucet drain assembly off the sink. So messy! Why did I bother to shower this morning? I'm just going to have to go wash my hair again after scraping so much icky stuff above my head.

The faucet, sadly, is faulty. It works fine right now, but the aerator doesn't sit straight due to something internal being bent or something. I've emailed the company, which has a reputation for fine faucets to uphold, so I'm hopeful that they will send me what I need to fix this. But I'm still disheartened that I'm going to have to do some more work before this repair job is done.

Never, ever expect that a DIY project will be speedily accomplished. That way you won't be too disappointed when it takes far too long.

Update (12/28/2014): I went to Home Depot yesterday and exchanged the faucet. I think I'm done. Now to install the other faucet and drain in the two-sink vanity!

Crazy Easy Homemade Yogurt

I make my own yogurt now. I thought doing so would require the hassle of wrapping canning jars in towels and putting them in a cooler overnight, but I found a much easier way online that has given me good results every time.

Here are the steps:

1) Heat a gallon of milk* in a pot to the point that it starts to have little bubbles around side and forms a skin on top.

2) Discard the milk skin and pour the milk into a cold crockpot liner (the ceramic part).

3) Let the milk cool down for a while. It should be warm but not burn your finger.

4) Mix in about a cup of yogurt starter.

5) Put the glass lid on the crockpot liner.

6) Put the crockpot liner, milk, and lid (all together, of course) in the oven.

7) Turn on the oven light (must be an incandescent bulb because you need its heat).

8) Let the yogurt incubate overnight in the warm oven. (DON'T TURN ON THE OVEN. Just the oven light.)

Voilà!. Yummy homemade yogurt for minimal cost. It's going to be runnier than the stuff from the store because you don't add pectin, but who needs solid yogurt when you're going to be mixing it with muesli or granola or using it in recipes like naan?

By the way, I make no guarantee that this will work in everyone else's kitchen. If your oven light isn't warm enough, if your crockpot liner is thicker than mine, etc., you might just end up with gross milk in the morning.

* I like to use whole milk. It makes thicker and tastier yogurt.

Drapes

We moved into a new-to-us-but-fifty-years-old house two years ago. The woman who lived in it before us had lovingly cared for the same drapes and carpet for at least thirty years. The pretty living room drapes (still on working traverse rods!) are starting to fall apart despite my attempts to mend and patch. It is finally time to get new drapes.

This is not a simple matter. Nowadays, there are five different common ways to hang drapes: tab top, rod pocket, grommet top, pinch pleat, and back tab. I personally like our traverse rods, and since they are hidden by wooden cornices, I could theoretically attach nearly any kind of drapery top to the little plastic pieces--half of which are ancient and brittle and will need to be replaced--and get the benefit of being able to open/close the drapes quickly and without touching them. I like the fullness of pinch pleat drapes, which is what we currently have, but the selection available in that category is not very good.

Do I try to sew my own drapes? It's theoretically pretty easy. Hem big rectangles of fabric, then, if I'm feeling particularly ambitious, pinch together at the top for pinch pleats. But this is my living room I'm talking about! I don't want my sad sewing skills to be responsible for curtains with iffy hems that make me cringe for the next decade. For if I buy 20 yards of fabric (I have to do two windows), even at bargain basement prices, that's a lot of money, so I won't just toss them unless they're truly dreadful.

I'm hoping for some good post-Christmas department store sales in the drapery departments this year.

Sycophant

An interesting etymology fact is that sycophant, which currently means "insincere flatterer," originated as a Greek word for a false accuser. False accusations could be very harshly punished in the ancient world. Some Mesopotamian laws made death the penalty for false accusations of certain crimes.

Why punish a false accuser so severely? To discourage false accusations, of course. False accusations tie up the legal system and harm the accused, particularly if the accused is wrongly found guilty and especially if he is executed due to the false accusation.

Recently the magazine Rolling Stone published an article alleging that a rape occurred at a UVA fraternity, and now it appears that the allegation, which resulted in university action against all the fraternities, was most likely fabricated. What punishment does a person in our modern world merit for making a false accusation of a serious crime such as rape? I certainly don't think it should be death or even imprisonment (since prison is reported to have a lot of actual rape culture going on, I disfavor prison in general if a different punishment will be as effective at crime deterrence), but there should be some sort of punishment. A fine. Community service. Something. Not only is bearing false witness against one's neighbor a violation of one of the ten commandments, it transforms our criminal justice system into a weapon against innocents. Defending one's self from criminal charges and dealing with the social and work fallout from such charges are not trivial considerations. I think sycophants, in both the ancient Greek and the modern sense, should suffer social opprobrium for their dishonest actions. And where that dishonesty has done harm to our justice system, the justice system should mete out an official, substantial penalty.

Sleep Training

My almost-six-month-old has regressed when it comes to getting enough sleep recently. I haven't been diligent about giving her naps in her crib (too often she ends up napping in her carseat near the family hubbub), and she's now old enough that it's time she had regularly scheduled naps. How did nearly six months pass already? Also, I've slipped back into getting up in the night every two hours instead of letting her put herself back to sleep. She used to sleep for 4-6 hours for at least one stretch at the beginning of the night, but she's stopped doing that. It can't be due to hunger, for she eats a lot, including milk (of course), rice cereal, puffs, and pureed fruit. We are both very tired. It's starting to interfere with my daily activities. So we are doing a little "sleep training," which consists mostly of me NOT getting up every two hours when she cries out. Here's hoping she's a fast learner!

Update (12/7/2014): And it turns out she is! We got a six hour stretch of sleep last night. :) I'm going to help her love resting her head on her crib mattress by getting her a chenille crib sheet for Christmas. (As the fifth girl, she doesn't need any toys under the tree!)

Reading Progress

Dd5 and I took a break for a couple of weeks or so from reading lessons. They weren't much fun, for she wasn't remembering some simple things such as the word "the." This afternoon, we finally had a formal lesson (#43 from Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons), and she did much, much better than either she or I anticipated. Where did this pleasant progress come from?

I think we owe it mostly to the Leapfrog Letter/Talking Word/Storybook Factory videos. Those are a terrific resource for children just figuring out the letter-sound code and how to apply their new knowledge. We own some Leapfrog letter fridge magnets, so dd5 and dd2 have been playing with them after watching the videos.

The concept of digraphs has started to really sink in for dd5. Previously she would see "sh" and say "ssss""hhh" nearly every time no matter how often I reminded her that "sh" says "sh." I suspect a few minutes of looking at this old toy, which we just had sitting around in a toybox, helped her realize that it's OK not to break the letters apart when looking at certain letter combinations:

Kiddicraft alphabet toy with 4 of most common English digraphs

The technical name for two letters representing one sound is "digraph." The most common consonant digraphs in English are "ch," "sh," "th," "ph," and "wh," per this phonics website. Note that four of those five digraphs are presented to the children on the Kiddicraft toy pictured above. How great is that! And it's not a fancy-schmancy electronic toy, so I don't have to worry about it running out of battery power. Even the hornbooks used for centuries didn't explicitly teach digraphs.

Traditional hornbook example, sold by Plimouth Plantation

Sadly, the Kiddicraft Flip-up Learning Center is only available used, but if you want one, it appears on eBay sometimes for a reasonable price. I think I found ours at a local thrift store a few years ago.

(I make no money from product placement in my blog posts. I'm just sharing things that I've found helpful.)